McGill Muggles join in the bizarre international Harry Potter broomsticks-and-balls game craze

by DREW NELLES

“I’m sorry, my friend is too drunk to come over and ask this,” the woman says, “but what’s with the broomsticks?”

Standing in Gert’s, McGill’s unappealing undergraduate bar, four members of the university’s Quidditch team clutch their handmade oak brooms and tell a curious stranger that, yes, they are devotees of a magical sport made up in a children’s book. They get this all the time, even in the sport’s unofficial home of Vermont, where the McGill team travelled last October to compete in the second annual Quidditch World Cup. “We were in the middle of Burlington,” says Karen Kumaki, one of the team’s Chasers, “walking around with Quidditch equipment and Canadian flags, getting honked at.”